Expert reviews and ratings

After solving the early firmware issue, the Western Digital Red 6TB is a great product. If you're building a NAS, or stuffing a desktop PC with double-digit amounts of storage with multiple hard disks in a RAID array, the Red series are the ones to go...

The WD Red in its new 6 TB form is self-evidently one huge disk. With the help of improved firmware it is now smiled upon for use in 8-bay NAS units, while its top speed of around 175 MB/s is faster than ever. Only at the level of smallest files do we see a compromise in performance, but providing your NAS is working with larger media files for instance you may be unlikely to notice this shortfall. For most people the inducement of half a dozen terabytes in one 3.5-inch hard disk will ensure this drive's deserved popularity for data magpies.

As inevitable as death and taxes, the size of hard disks is always changing, getting bigger by the year. We were at a 4 TB impasse for a while though, since late in 2011 when first Seagate and closely followed by Hitachi, released the first 3.5-inch SATA...

Like all Western Digital Red models, the 6TB model has NAS-specific firmware called NASWare. The Red 6TB uses the latest version of NASWare, version 3.0, which isn’t available as a download that you can install on older Red disks. According to Western...

Perhaps you want a small, stylish NAS that takes up the bare minimum of space, in which case you need a pair of 2.5" 1TB WD Red drives. Please move smartly to the left and read the previous review, where you'll find everything you need.That takes care of...

WD's Red drives are good solution if you've just bought a NAS enclosure and aren't sure what types of drives you want to stick in there. They have a slightly longer warranty than desktop drives, as well as a longer stated mean time between failure,...

When WD first announced its Red NAS drives, I admit that it seemed a little expected. The company has targeted the surveillance and audio / video market before, so catering to NAS users, to me, seemed to be the next logical step. That said, while it...

For small businesses and power users who have heavy dependence on a NAS device, particularly for those using a NAS that's regularly getting a lot of data written to it, the Western Digital Red line is a good investment, and worth the slight premium....

The Western Digital RED family of NAS drives has been on the market for a while, and it keeps growing. There are 2.5-inch 750GB and 1TB drives just as there are 1TB to 6TB 3.5-inch drives in the WD RED series.The 6TB RED HDD was released last year and...

The WD Red 1TB (2.5 inch) and 6TB.Undersides.The Red drives we're going to examine today come in starkly different form factors. The Red 6TB is more of what we've seen before, the latest high capacity desktop flagship for users with limited drive bays...

For those looking maximize their storage capabilities in a NAS, the WD Red 6TB drives are a great option. Not only to they perform very well, but they offer 2TB more capacity than anything else currently in the market on a third generation platform that...

Although we don't do power consumption tests on HDDs cause quite frankly it's very hard to be 100% on the spot with such results we did perform our usual temperature and noise level tests both of which showcase that Western Digital has indeed invested...

12TB of RAID storage? Who would not want that?With eight pages of serious benchmarking, multiple test platforms for collecting all the data we need, and over a thousand dollars worth of hard drives from all three major manufacturers, where does APH...

The Western Digital Red family of NAS hard disk drives is quite an interesting enhancement of the Western Digital Green family of low-powered, slower-spinning hard disk drives (formerly known as the Western Digital Caviar Green family). It is...

In creating the RED 4TB, Western Digital could very well have launched a hard drive that was extremely capable for its intended market yet only appealed to a very narrow market. Instead, this new drive is capable enough to pull duty in a number of...

Despite being first to market with a NAS-targeted hard drive, WD has proven itself to be the late one on offering a 4TB model – Seagate beat it to the punch just a couple of months earlier. It was a little baffling that WD didn't offer the top-density...

Western Digital's Red and Se 4TB hard drives are two high capacity sides of the same coin. Both are optimized for RAID/NAS use but the Red is a low power model for consumer use while the Se is a high performance enterprise...